Even as the American Medical Association continues their relentless assault against the medical market through restrictions on both provider and consumer, Canadians finally seem to be warming up to the idea that perhaps government doesn’t do things best.

An efficient market depends on the consumer being both informed and rational in his choices. This obviously requires familiarity with the performance of the product (success rate, side effects, etc.) as well as an understanding of how the drug works. This is a bit much to ask of your average consumer, considering all of the education and training required to make a doctor or a pharmacologist. It would be a textbook case of a highly inefficient market with a great degree of misallocation of resources. In other words, patients would go broke as they died while pursuing ineffective treatments.

At its annual meeting in Chicago this week the American Medical Association made several completely statist and asinine policy proposals.

Radley Balko jokingly refers to them as the American Meddling Association. And he’s completely on point.

The so-called “Citizens’ Health Care Working Group,” created by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which Michael F. Cannon of the Cato Institute accurately labeled as a more or less leftist front group, is soliciting comments on its interim recommendations on how to fix American healthcare. They of course, don’t mention any of the obvious solutions.